Throughout this Winter Quarter, the SSRC is partnering with the Department of Sociology to present a series of workshops and conversations about research ethics. To extend those conversations, we will be posting weekly questions about research ethics here for discussion.
This week, Scientific American posted a short interview with NASA’s chief climate scientist, Jim Hansen, often referred to as “the father of global warming”. The interview centers on Hansen’s activism in favor of policy changes to curb CO2 emissions and fossil fuel dependency to curtail climate change. In recent years, Hansen has intentionally been leaving the lab to attend protests and rallies—even getting arrested multiple times, most recently this summer at the White House protesting an oil pipeline.
Suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst being arrested, via the Nationaal Archief, Netherlands
Asked at the top of the interview whether his credibility as a scientist has suffered due to his political activism around his subject of study, Hansen says:
If I was not publishing papers in the peer reviewed literature, then that would be a valid criticism. But I am still publishing. I’m trying to make that science clear to the public. It’s not easy: The scientific evidence has really become very clear, and we’re not doing a very good job of communicating that.
Hansen’s answer gets at the heart of something we talk about all the time at the SSRC: Getting socially-relevant research findings with the potential to impact policy into public discussions.
